Month: July 2009

Due to a bug in Google Toolbar, the size of Firefox history/bookmarks file (places.sqlite) bloats up drastically. Instead of being in the range of 20MB-30MB, it can grow as big as 300 MB. And it keeps growing as you browse more websites.

Google Toolbar, instead of keeping only 9 thumbnails in Places.sqlite file. It stores thumbnail of each website you visit.

This affects RecentX‘s performance as RecentX reads the history from Places.sqlite.

Here is a tool called CompressSqliteDatabase that can compress any sqlite3 database. As it was designed for RecentX, the tool automatically detects a firefox database and asks you if you wish to delete all the Google Toolbar thumbnails so that it can compress it back to a very small size.

If you have Google Toolbar installed then chances are that your Firefox history file will be too big.

Download the below tool to compress your Firefox history file. The file is stored under Firefox’s profile folder. Typically – %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\ . Copy and paste this path in Start->Run window and press OK in the Run window. This will open the ‘Profiles’ folder. Open the right profile folder here. The profile folder is normally named as (something).default. Here you will find the places.sqlite file.